Luckily absolute performance still exists, it's just that we've normalized shipping less efficient software slopped out because there'll probably be new silicon in a few years so it doesn't matter.

Commodity hardware is plenty powerful and can be taken advantage of should prices signal efficiency is important again.

Maybe institutions and companies are gonna have to get smarter at making use of stuff that they have instead of just churning thru hardware. It's hard to see it being sustainable anyway to be constantly turning over hardware every few years if not yearly. In a way, this chilling of consumerism is kinda neat.